Archive for May, 2010
Do you hear what I hear?
May 6th
The FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made a statement today that makes me wonder what took them so long.
In 1997 I spent some time lobbying at the Minnesota Legislature and the Minnesota Public Utilities commission about the differences between a data connection and data communications. The differences may seem plainly obvious to those of us in the Internet / Cable / Telephone industries, but for those milling around on the hill, they can’t quite grasp the difference between a carrier pigeon and the message tied to it’s leg. This analogy was too esoteric for those who were approaching dementia so I changed the analogy to a letter carried by a postal service. They seemed to understand that governments should regulate the postal service, but not the contents of the letter. You tell me, which part of that analogy resembles a connection and which resembles information? Pretty obvious, huh?
Content really IS king.
May 4th
The official draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was recently released.
All I can say is wow.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation did some preliminary analysis of ACTA. What it comes down to is that ACTA is about to require that signatory countries impose liabilities on ISPs for their users’ behaviors. That means ISPs need to be enforcers/police/nannys for their users. And US ISPs will lose any protections they currently enjoy from the DMCA.
If you use the Internet to share copyrighted information, YOUR ISP could face penalties. Do you think ISPs will accept this? You might expect ISPs to be up in arms about ACTA, but instead they look like they might accept ACTA openly. By all counts ISPs were lucky the FCC lost the case against Comcast. Otherwise ISPs would have no way to be an enforcer! Just kidding.
